Tag Archives: downloads

Jim Gettys provides
an extensive look at the FQ_CoDel queue-management algorithm as a big
piece of the solution to bufferbloat problems. “Simple
‘request/response’ or time based protocols are preferentially scheduled
relative to bulk data transport. This means that your VOIP packets, your
TCP handshakes, cryptographic associations, your button press in your game,
your DHCP or other basic network protocols all get preferential service
without the complexity of extensive packet classification, even under very
heavy load of other ongoing flows. Your phone call can work well despite
large downloads or video use.”

VLC is the media player of choice for Internet users around the globe. Downloaded for desktop at least 2,493,000,000 times since February 2005, VLC is an absolute giant. And those figures don’t even include GNU/Linux, iOS, Android, Chrome OS or Windows Phone downloads either.

Aside from its incredible functionality, VLC (operated by the VideoLAN non-profit) has won the hearts of Internet users for other key reasons, not least its commitment to being free and open source software. While it’s true to say that VLC doesn’t cost a penny, the term ‘free’ actually relates to the General Public License (GPL) under which it’s distributed.

The GPL aims to guarantee that software under it remains ‘free’ for all current and future users. To benefit from these protections, the GPL requires people who modify and redistribute software to afford others the same freedoms by informing them of the requirement to make source code available.

Since VLC is extremely popular and just about as ‘free’ as software can get, people get extremely defensive when they perceive that a third-party is benefiting from the software without adhering to the terms of the generous GPL license. That was the case beginning a few hours ago when veteran Reddit user MartinVanBallin pointed out a piece of software on the Google Play Store.

“They took VLC, put in ads, didn’t attribute VLC or follow the open source license, and they’re using Media Player Classics icon,” MartinVanBallin wrote.

The software is called 321 Media Player and has an impressive 4.5 score from more than 101,000 reviews. Despite not mentioning VLC or the GPL, it is based completely on VLC, as the image below (and other proof) shows.

VLC Media Player 321 Media Player

TorrentFreak spoke with VideoLAN President Jean-Baptiste Kempf who confirmed that the clone is in breach of the GPL.

“The Android version of VLC is under the license GPLv3, which requires everything inside the application to be open source and sharing the source,” Kempf says.

“This clone seems to use a closed-source advertisement component (are there any that are open source?), which is a clear violation of our copyleft. Moreover, they don’t seem to share the source at all, which is also a violation.”

Perhaps the most amazing thing is the popularity of the software. According to stats provided by Google, 321 Media Player has amassed between five and ten million downloads. That’s not an insignificant amount when one considers that unlike VLC, 321 Media Player contains revenue-generating ads.

Using GPL-licensed software for commercial purposes is allowed providing the license terms are strictly adhered to. Kempf informs TF that VideoLAN doesn’t mind if this happens but in this case, the GPL is not being respected.

“A fork application which changes some things is an interesting thing, because they maybe have something to give back to our community. The application here, is just a parasite, and I think they are useless and dangerous,” Kempf says.

All that being said, turning VLC itself into adware is something the VideoLAN team is opposed to. In fact, according to questions answered by Kempf last September, the team turned down “several tens of millions of euros” to turn their media player into an ad-supported platform.

“Integrating crap, adware and spyware with VLC is not OK,” Kempf informs TF.

TorrentFreak contacted the developer of 321 Media Player for comment but at the time of publication, we were yet to receive a response. We also asked for a copy of the source code for 321 Media Player as the GPL requires, but that wasn’t forthcoming either.

In the meantime, it appears that a small army of Reddit users are trying to get something done about the ‘rogue’ app by reporting it as an “inappropriate copycat” to Google. Whether this will have any effect remains to be seen but according to Kempf, tackling these clone versions has proven extremely difficult in the past.

“We reported this application already more than three times and Google refuses to take it down,” he says.

“Our experience is that it is very difficult to take these kinds of apps down, even if they embed spyware or malware. Maybe it is because it makes money for Google.”

Finally, Kempf also points to the obviously named “Indian VLC Player” on Google Play. Another VLC clone with up to 500,000 downloads, this one appears to breach both copyright and trademark law.

“We remove applications that violate our policies, such as apps that are illegal,” a Google spokesperson informs TorrentFreak.

“We don’t comment on individual applications; you can check out our policies for more information.”

The Tribler client has been around for over a decade. We first covered it in 2006 and since then it’s developed into a truly decentralized BitTorrent client.

Even if all torrent sites were shut down today, Tribler users would still be able to find and add new content.

The project is not run by regular software developers but by a team of quality researchers at Delft University of Technology. There are currently more than 45 masters students, various thesis students, five dedicated scientific developers, and several professors involved.

Simply put, Triber aims to make the torrent ecosystem truly decentralized and anonymous. A social network of peers that can survive even if all torrent sites ceased to exist.

“Search and download torrents with less worries or censorship,” Triber’s tagline reads.

Like many other BitTorrent clients, Tribler has a search box at the top of the application. However, the search results that appear when users type in a keyword don’t come from a central index. Instead, they come directly from other peers.

Thriber’s search results

With the latest release, Tribler 7.0, the project adds another element to the mix, it’s very own blockchain. This blockchain keeps track of how much people are sharing and rewards them accordingly.

“Tribler is a torrent client for social people, who help each other. You can now earn tokens by helping others. It is specifically designed to prevent freeriding and detect hit-and-run peers.” Tribler leader Dr. Johan Pouwelse tells TF.

“You help other Tribler users by seeding and by enhancing their privacy. In return, you get faster downloads, as your tokens show you contribute to the community.”

Pouwelse, who aims to transform BitTorrent into an ethical Darknet, just presented the latest release at Stanford University. In addition, the Internet Engineering Task Force is also considering the blockchain implementation as an official Internet standard.

This recognition from academics and technology experts is welcome, of course, but Triber’s true power comes from the users. The client has gathered a decent userbase of the years but there sure is plenty room for improvement on this front.

The anonymity aspect is perhaps one of the biggest selling points and Pouwelse believes that this will greatly benefit from the blockchain implementation.

Triber provides users with pseudo anonymity by routing the transfers through other users. However, this means that the amount of bandwith used by the application inceases as well. Thus far, this hasn’t worked very well, which resulted in slow anonymous downloads.

“With the integrated blockchain release today we think we can start fixing the problem of both underseeded swarms and fast proxies,” Dr. Pouwelse says.

“Our solution is basically very simple, only social people get decent performance on Tribler. This means in a few years we will end up with only users that act nice. Others leave.”

Tribler’s trust stats

Tribler provides users with quite a bit of flexibility on the anonymity site. The feature can be turned off completely, or people can choose a protection layer ranging from one to four hops.

What’s also important to note is that users don’t operate as exit nodes by default. The IP-addresses of the exit nodes are public ouitside the network and can be monitored, so that would only increase liability.

So who are the exit-nodes in this process then? According to Pouwelse’s rather colorful description, these appear to be volunteers that run their code through a VPN a or a VPS server.

“The past years we have created an army of bots we call ‘Self-replicating Autonomous Entities’. These are Terminator-style self-replicating pieces of code which have their own Bitcoin wallet to go out there and buy servers to run more copies of themselves,” he explains.

“They utilize very primitive genetic evolution to improve survival, buy a VPN for protection, earn credits using our experimental credit mining preview release, and sell our bandwidth tokens on our integrated decentral market for cold hard Bitcoin cash to renew the cycle of life for the next month billing cycle of their VPS provider.”

Some might question why there’s such a massive research project dedicated to building an anonymous BitTorrent network. What are the benefits to society?

The answer is clear, according to Pouwelse. The ethical darknet they envision will be a unique micro-economy where sharing is rewarded, without having to expose one’s identity.

“We are building the Internet of Trust. The Internet can do amazing things, it even created honesty among drugs dealers,” he says, referring to the infamous Silk Road.

“Reliability rating of drugs lords gets you life imprisonment. That’s not something we want. We are creating our own trustworthy micro-economy for bandwidth tokens and real Bitcoins,” he adds.

The debate over whether online piracy helps or hurts music sales has been dragging on for several decades now.

The issue has been researched extensively with both positive and negative effects being reported, often varying based on the type of artist, music genre and media, among other variables.

One of the more extensive studies was published this month in the peer-reviewed Information Economics and Policy journal, by Queen’s University economics researcher Jonathan Lee.

In a paper titled ‘Purchase, pirate, publicize: Private-network music sharing and market album sales’ he examined the effect of BitTorrent-based piracy on both digital and physical music sales.

We covered an earlier version of the study two years ago when it was still a work in progress. With updates to the research methods and a data sample, the results are now more clear.

The file-sharing data was obtained from an unnamed private BitTorrent tracker and covers a data set of 250,000 albums and more than five million downloads. These were matched to US sales data for thousands of albums provided by Nielsen SoundScan.

By refining the estimation approach and updating the matching technique, the final version of the paper shows some interesting results.

Based on the torrent tracker data, Lee finds that piracy can boost sales of mid-tier artists, both for physical CDs and digital downloads. For the most popular artists, this effect is reversed. In both cases, the impact is the largest for digital sales.

“I now find that top artists are harmed and mid-tier artists may be helped in both markets, but that these effects are larger for digital sales,” Lee tells TorrentFreak. “This is consistent with the idea that people are more willing to switch between digital piracy and digital sales than between digital piracy and physical CDs.”

The findings lead to the conclusion that there is no ideal ‘one-size-fits-all’ response to piracy. In fact, some unauthorized sharing may be a good thing.

This is in line with observations from musicians themselves over the past years. Several top artists have admitted the positive effects of piracy, including Ed Sheeran, who recently said that he owes his career to it.

“I know that’s a bad thing to say, because I’m part of a music industry that doesn’t like illegal file sharing,” Sheeran said in an interview with CBS. “Illegal file sharing was what made me. It was students in England going to university, sharing my songs with each other.”

Sheeran sharing on TPB

Today, Sheeran is in a totally different position of course. As one of the top artists, he would now be hurt by piracy. However, the new stars of tomorrow may still reap the benefits.

According to the researcher, the music industry should realize that shutting down pirate sites may not always be the best option. On the contrary, file-sharing sites may be useful as promotional platforms in some cases.

“Following above, a policy of total shutdown of private file sharing networks seems excessively costly (compared with their relatively small impact on sales) and unwise (as a one-size-fits-all policy). It would be better to make legal consumption more convenient, reducing the demand for piracy as an alternative to purchasing,” Lee tells us.

“It would also be smart to experiment with releasing music onto piracy networks themselves, especially for up-and-coming artists, similar to the free promotion afforded by commercial radio.”

The researcher makes another interesting extrapolation from the findings. In recent years, some labels and artists have signed exclusive deals with some streaming platforms. This means that content is not available everywhere, and this fragmentation may make piracy look more appealing.

“Here you can view piracy as a non-fragmented alternative platform to Spotify et al. Thus consumers will have a strong incentive to use a single non-fragmented platform (piracy) over having multiple subscriptions to fragmented platforms,” Lee says.

It would be better for the labels to publish their music on all platforms, and to make these more appealing and convenient than the pirate alternative.

The data used for the research was collected several years ago before the big streaming boom, so it might be that the results are different today. However, it is clear that the effect of piracy on sales is not as uniform as the music industry often portrays it.

When perfect copies of movies leak out onto the Internet in advance of their official release dates, there’s usually an element of skullduggery at play.

This can sometimes involve people intercepting, stealing, or borrowing DVD screener discs, for example. However, other problems can unexpectedly raise their heads.

Case in point – the pre-release leak of Marvel’s Thor Ragnarok this past weekend.

With a disc release planned for February 26th just four months after the superhero movie’s theatrical debut, digital distribution on iTunes was set to go ahead on February 19th.

However, due to what appears to be a significant blunder at Apple, the $180 million movie is now being furiously pirated all over the Internet. A small sample of the latest leak (all releases with an upload date of ‘today’) can be seen in the screenshot below, sourced from The Pirate Bay.

Plenty of choice for pirates….

So what went wrong? According to a user on Reddit who has since deleted his post, a legal pre-order purchase was incorrectly made available for download a month early.

“I pre-ordered Thor Ragnarok on Vudu yesterday and it links it to my iTunes also,” the user explained.

“But curiously it showed up in my iTunes library this morning (pre-orders shouldn’t). And now I can watch the full movie in HD. I obviously downloaded it right away. I know its supposed to come out February 20th.”

The precise mechanism behind the movie incorrectly appearing on iTunes isn’t clear but the user reported that he didn’t buy it on the platform. Instead, he purchased the 4K version on Vudu, which was linked to his MoviesAnywhere account, which was in turn linked to iTunes.

For anyone unaware, MoviesAnywhere is a completely free service that allows people to watch their iTunes, Vudu, Google Play and Amazon movies in one place, on Apple, Android, Roku, Amazon and Chromecast devices.

Shortly after, other users noted that after purchasing the movie using the same process, they achieved the same result.

“Just tried the same way as you and it is now available for viewing on iTunes,” one reported.

Of course, one can’t simply share iTunes movies with others online but there are people out there prepared to put in the effort to make that possible. Release group ‘EVO’, which has the most popular torrent of Thor Ragnarok out there at the moment, took the time to explain the headaches it gave them.

“More than 10 hours working in a way to remove this fucking protection finally come to a end,” the group said.

“Casualties: 1 account banned. Lol. But it was worth it. Enjoy fellas. Have a good weekend. No VIP required. No pennies needed. All free.”

From a piracy perspective, illegal downloads are now metaphorically flying off the shelves. It won’t be what Marvel wanted so getting to the bottom of who is to blame will now be a top priority.

In its annual “Out-of-Cycle Review of Notorious Markets” the office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has listed a long list of websites said to be involved in online piracy.

The list is compiled with high-level input from various trade groups, including the MPAA and RIAA who both submitted their recommendations (1,2) during early October last year.

With the word “allegedly” used more than two dozen times in the report, the US government notes that its report does not constitute cast-iron proof of illegal activity. However, it urges the countries from where the so-called “notorious markets” operate to take action where they can, while putting owners and facilitators on notice that their activities are under the spotlight.

“A goal of the List is to motivate appropriate action by owners, operators, and service providers in the private sector of these and similar markets, as well as governments, to reduce piracy and counterfeiting,” the report reads.

“USTR highlights the following marketplaces because they exemplify global counterfeiting and piracy concerns and because the scale of infringing activity in these marketplaces can cause significant harm to U.S. intellectual property (IP) owners, consumers, legitimate online platforms, and the economy.”

The report begins with a page titled “Issue Focus: Illicit Streaming Devices”. Unsurprisingly, particularly given their place in dozens of headlines last year, the segment focus on the set-top box phenomenon. The piece doesn’t list any apps or software tools as such but highlights the general position, claiming a cost to the US entertainment industry of $4-5 billion a year.

Torrent Sites

In common with previous years, the USTR goes on to list several of the world’s top torrent sites but due to changes in circumstances, others have been delisted. ExtraTorrent, which shut down May 2017, is one such example.

As the world’s most famous torrent site, The Pirate Bay gets a prominent mention, with the USTR noting that the site is of “symbolic importance as one of the longest-running and most vocal torrent sites. The USTR underlines the site’s resilience by noting its hydra-like form while revealing an apparent secret concerning its hosting arrangements.

“The Pirate Bay has allegedly had more than a dozen domains hosted in various countries around the world, applies a reverse proxy service, and uses a hosting provider in Vietnam to evade further enforcement action,” the USTR notes.

Other torrent sites singled out for criticism include RARBG, which was nominated for the listing by the movie industry. According to the USTR, the site is hosted in Bosnia and Herzegovina and has changed hosting services to prevent shutdowns in recent years.

1337x.to and the meta-search engine Torrentz2 are also given a prime mention, with the USTR noting that they are “two of the most popular torrent sites that allegedly infringe U.S. content industry’s copyrights.” Russia’s RuTracker is also targeted for criticism, with the government noting that it’s now one of the most popular torrent sites in the world.

Streaming & Cyberlockers

While torrent sites are still important, the USTR reserves considerable space in its report for streaming portals and cyberlocker-type services.

4Shared.com, a file-hosting site that has been targeted by dozens of millions of copyright notices, is reportedly no longer able to use major US payment providers. Nevertheless, the British Virgin Islands company still collects significant sums from premium accounts, advertising, and offshore payment processors, USTR notes.

Cyberlocker Rapidgator gets another prominent mention in 2017, with the USTR noting that the Russian-hosted platform generates millions of dollars every year through premium memberships while employing rewards and affiliate schemes.

Due to its increasing popularity as a hosting and streaming operation, Openload.co (Romania) is now a big target for the USTR. “The site is used frequently in combination with add-ons in illicit streaming devices. In November 2017, users visited Openload.co a staggering 270 million times,” the USTR writes.

Owned by a Swiss company and hosted in the Netherlands, the popular site Uploaded is also criticized by the US alongside France’s 1Fichier.com, which allegedly hosts pirate games while being largely unresponsive to takedown notices. Dopefile.pk, a Pakistan-based storage outfit, is also highlighted.

On the video streaming front, it’s perhaps no surprise that the USTR focuses on sites like FMovies (Sweden), GoStream (Vietnam), Movie4K.tv (Russia) and PrimeWire. An organization collectively known as the MovShare group which encompasses Nowvideo.sx, WholeCloud.net, NowDownload.cd, MeWatchSeries.to and WatchSeries.ac, among others, is also listed.

Unauthorized music / research papers

While most of the above are either focused on video or feature it as part of their repertoire, other sites are listed for their attention to music. Convert2MP3.net is named as one of the most popular stream-ripping sites in the world and is highlighted due to the prevalence of YouTube-downloader sites and the 2017 demise of YouTube-MP3.

“Convert2MP3.net does not appear to have permission from YouTube or other sites and does not have permission from right holders for a wide variety of music represented by major U.S. labels,” the USTR notes.

Given the amount of attention the site has received in 2017 as ‘The Pirate Bay of Research’, Libgen.io and Sci-Hub.io (not to mention the endless proxy and mirror sites that facilitate access) are given a detailed mention in this year’s report.

“Together these sites make it possible to download — all without permission and without remunerating authors, publishers or researchers — millions of copyrighted books by commercial publishers and university presses; scientific, technical and medical journal articles; and publications of technological standards,” the USTR writes.

Service providers

But it’s not only sites that are being put under pressure. Following a growing list of nominations in previous years, Swiss service provider Private Layer is again singled out as a rogue player in the market for hosting 1337x.to and Torrentz2.eu, among others.

“While the exact configuration of websites changes from year to year, this is the fourth consecutive year that the List has stressed the significant international trade impact of Private Layer’s hosting services and the allegedly infringing sites it hosts,” the USTR notes.

“Other listed and nominated sites may also be hosted by Private Layer but are using
reverse proxy services to obfuscate the true host from the public and from law enforcement.”

The USTR notes Switzerland’s efforts to close a legal loophole that restricts enforcement and looks forward to a positive outcome when the draft amendment is considered by parliament.

Perhaps a little surprisingly given its recent anti-piracy efforts and overtures to the US, Russia’s leading social network VK.com again gets a place on the new list. The USTR recognizes VK’s efforts but insists that more needs to be done.

Social networking and e-commerce

“In 2016, VK reached licensing agreements with major record companies, took steps to limit third-party applications dedicated to downloading infringing content from the site, and experimented with content recognition technologies,” the USTR writes.

“Despite these positive signals, VK reportedly continues to be a hub of infringing activity and the U.S. motion picture industry reports that they find thousands of infringing files on the site each month.”

Finally, in addition to traditional pirate sites, the US also lists online marketplaces that allegedly fail to meet appropriate standards. Re-added to the list in 2016 after a brief hiatus in 2015, China’s Alibaba is listed again in 2017. The development provoked an angry response from the company.

Describing his company as a “scapegoat”, Alibaba Group President Michael Evans said that his platform had achieved a 25% drop in takedown requests and has even been removing infringing listings before they make it online.

“In light of all this, it’s clear that no matter how much action we take and progress we make, the USTR is not actually interested in seeing tangible results,” Evans said in a statement.

The full list of sites in the Notorious Markets Report 2017 (pdf) can be found below.

While the data are not complete or perfect, looking at the larger numbers provides some interesting insights. The site recently released its overview of the most downloaded titles in various categories per country, for example.

What stands out is that there’s a lot of overlap between countries that seem vastly different.

Game of Thrones is the most downloaded TV show in America, but also in Iran, Mongolia, Uruguay, and Zambia. Other popular TV-shows in 2017, such as The Flash, The Big Bang Theory, and The Walking Dead also appear in the top ten in all these countries.

On the movie side, a similar picture emerges. Titles such as Wonder Woman, The Fate of the Furious, and Logan appear in many of the top tens. In fact, browsing through the result for various countries there are surprisingly little outliers.

The movie Prityazhenie does well in Russia and in India, Dangal is among the most pirated titles, but most titles appear globally. Even in North Korea, where Internet access is extremely limited, Game of Thrones is listed as the most downloaded TV-show.

However, North Korea also shows some odd results, perhaps because there are only a few downloads per day on average.

Browsing through the most downloaded movies we see that there are a lot of kids’ movies in the top ten, with ‘Despicable Me’ as the top result, followed by ‘Moana’ and ‘Minions’. The Hobbit trilogy also made it into the top ten.

12 most pirated movies in North Korea (2017)

The most eye-catching result, however, is the Michael Moore documentary ‘Where to Invade Next.’ While the title may suggest something more malicious, in this travelogue Moore ‘invades’ countries around the world to see in what areas the US can improve itself.

It’s unclear why North Koreans are so interested in this progressive film. Perhaps they are trying to pick up a few tips as well. This could also explain why good old MacGyver is listed among the most downloaded TV-series.

The annual overview of ‘I Know What You Download’ is available here, for those who are interested in more country statistics.

Finally, we have to note that North Korean IP-ranges have been vulnerable to hijacks in the past so you’re never 100% sure who might be using them. It might be the Russians…

B2’s API is similar to, but simpler than Amazon’s S3 API, making it super easy for developers to integrate with B2 Cloud Storage.

10 View Code Examples To Get Your B2 Project Started

The B2 API is well documented and has code examples for cURL, Java, Python, Swift, Ruby, C#, and PHP. For example, here’s how to create a B2 Bucket.

11 Developers can set the B2 part size as low as 5 MB

When working with large files, the minimum file part size can be set as low as 5MB or as high as 5GB. This gives developers the ability to maximize the throughput of B2 data uploads and downloads. See Large Files and Downloading for more developer tips.

Fifteen years ago BitTorrent conquered the masses. It offered a superior way to share large video files, something that was virtually impossible at the time.

With the shift to online video streaming, BitTorrent has lost prominence in recent years. That’s a shame, since the technology offers many advantages.

This is one of the reasons why Stanford University graduate Feross Aboukhadijeh invented WebTorrent. The technology, which is supported by most modern browsers, allows users to seamlessly stream videos on the web with BitTorrent.

In the few years that it’s been around, several tools and services have been built on WebTorrent, including a dedicated desktop client. The desktop version basically serves as a torrent client that streams torrents almost instantaneously on Windows, Linux, and Mac.

Add in AirPlay, Chromecast and DLNA support and it brings these videos to any network-connected TV as well. Quite a powerful tool, as many people have discovered in recent months.

This week Feross informed TorrentFreak that WebTorrent Desktop had reached the one million download mark. That’s a major milestone for a modest project with no full-time developer. But while users seem to be happy, it’s not perfect yet.

“WebTorrent Desktop is the best torrent app in existence. Yet, the app suffers from performance issues when too many torrents are added or too many peers show up. It’s also missing important power user features like bandwidth throttling,” Feross says.

The same is true for WebTorrent itself, which the desktop version is built on. The software has been on the verge of version 1.0.0 for over two years now but needs some more work to make the final leap. This is why Feross would like to invest more time into the projects, given the right support.

Last month Feross launched a Patreon campaign to crowdfund future development of WebTorrent including the desktop version. There are dozens of open issues and a lot of plans and with proper funding, the developer can free up time to work on these.

“The goal of the campaign is to allow me to spend a few days per week addressing these issues,” Feross says, adding that all software he works on is completely free and always has been.

Feross and cat

Thus far the fundraising campaign is going well. WebTorrent’s developer has received support from dozens of people, totaling $1,730 a month through Patreon alone, and he has signed up the privacy oriented browser Brave and video site PopChest as Platinum backers.

Community-driven funding is a great way to support Open Source projects, Feross believes, and he is encouraging others to try it out as well.

“I’ve been promoting Patreon heavily within my community as a way for open source software developers to get paid for their work,” Feross says.

“The norm in the industry right now is that no one gets paid — it’s all volunteer work, even though we’re generating a lot of value for the world! Patreon is a really promising solution for software people like me.”

People who want to give WebTorrent Desktop a try can download a copy from the official site. More information on the core WebTorrent technology and its implementations is available there was well. And if you like what you see, Feross still needs a bit of help to reach his Patreon goal.

The seventh season of Game of Thrones brought tears and joy to HBO this year.

It was the most-viewed season thus far, with record-breaking TV ratings. But on the other hand, the company and its flagship product were plagued by hacks, leaks, and piracy, of course.

Game of Thrones’ year ends with a high, or low, depending on one’s perspective. For the sixth year in a row it has the honor of becoming the most-downloaded TV show through BitTorrent.

Although there was no new swarm record, traffic-wise the interest was plenty. The highest number of people actively sharing an episode across several torrents was 400,000 at its peak, right after the season finale came online.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s no growth in piracy. BitTorrent traffic only makes up a small portion of the piracy landscape. A lot of people use streaming sites and services nowadays, which are harder to measure.

While the top of this year’s list is made up of familiar names, there are also some new entries. Prison Break made a comeback, which didn’t go unnoticed by torrent fans, while Rick and Morty and Sherlock also make an appearance.

—

Below we have compiled a list of the most torrented TV-shows worldwide (single episode) for 2017. The ranking is compiled by TorrentFreak based on several sources, including statistics reported by public BitTorrent trackers.

We have decided to stop reporting download estimates. Due to various changes in the torrent index/tracker landscape it’s become more challenging to monitor downloads accurately, so a ranked overview makes most sense.

We recently launched AWS Architecture Monthly, a new subscription service on Kindle that will push a selection of the best content around cloud architecture from AWS, with a few pointers to other content you might also enjoy.

From building a simple website to crafting an AI-based chat bot, the choices of technologies and the best practices in how to apply them are constantly evolving. Our goal is to supply you each month with a broad selection of the best new tech content from AWS — from deep-dive tutorials to industry-trend articles.

At this time, Architecture Monthly annual subscriptions are only available in the France (new), US, UK, and Germany. As more countries become available, we’ll update you here on the blog. For Amazon.com countries not listed above, we are offering single-issue downloads — also accessible from our landing page. The content is the same as in the subscription but requires individual-issue downloads.

FAQI have to submit my credit card information for a free subscription? While you do have to submit your card information at this time (as you would for a free book in the Kindle store), it won’t be charged. This will remain a free, annual subscription and includes all 10 issues for the year.

Why isn’t the subscription available everywhere? As new countries get added to Kindle Newsstand, we’ll ensure we add them for Architecture Monthly. This month we added France but anticipate it will take some time for the new service to move into additional markets.

What countries are included in the Amazon.com list where the issues can be downloaded? Andorra, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Gibraltar, Guernsey, India, Ireland, Isle of Man, Japan, Jersey, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Mexico, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand, San Marino, Spain, Switzerland, Vatican City

Downloads of Ubuntu 17.10 have been disabled due to an
issue that can cause it to corrupt the firmware on some laptops.
Lenovo laptops appear to be the most affected, but the problem is
apparently not limited to them. The intel-spi driver has been named as the
source of the problem; it’s not clear whether other distributions may also
be affected. If you downloaded 17.10, you might want to hold off on
installing it.

This post claims to be by a libertarian in support of net neutrality. As a libertarian, I need to debunk this. “Net neutrality” is a case of one-hand clapping, you rarely hear the competing side, and thus, that side may sound attractive. This post is about the other side, from a libertarian point of view.

That post just repeats the common, and wrong, left-wing talking points. I mean, there might be a libertarian case for some broadband regulation, but this isn’t it.

This thing they call “net neutrality” is just left-wing politics masquerading as some sort of principle. It’s no different than how people claim to be “pro-choice”, yet demand forced vaccinations. Or, it’s no different than how people claim to believe in “traditional marriage” even while they are on their third “traditional marriage”.

Properly defined, “net neutrality” means no discrimination of network traffic. But nobody wants that. A classic example is how most internet connections have faster download speeds than uploads. This discriminates against upload traffic, harming innovation in upload-centric applications like DropBox’s cloud backup or BitTorrent’s peer-to-peer file transfer. Yet activists never mention this, or other types of network traffic discrimination, because they no more care about “net neutrality” than Trump or Gingrich care about “traditional marriage”.

Instead, when people say “net neutrality”, they mean “government regulation”. It’s the same old debate between who is the best steward of consumer interest: the free-market or government.

Specifically, in the current debate, they are referring to the Obama-era FCC “Open Internet” order and reclassification of broadband under “Title II” so they can regulate it. Trump’s FCC is putting broadband back to “Title I”, which means the FCC can’t regulate most of its “Open Internet” order.

Don’t be tricked into thinking the “Open Internet” order is anything but intensely politically. The premise behind the order is the Democrat’s firm believe that it’s government who created the Internet, and all innovation, advances, and investment ultimately come from the government. It sees ISPs as inherently deceitful entities who will only serve their own interests, at the expense of consumers, unless the FCC protects consumers.

It says so right in the order itself. It starts with the premise that broadband ISPs are evil, using illegitimate “tactics” to hurt consumers, and continues with similar language throughout the order.

A good contrast to this can be seen in Tim Wu’s non-political original paper in 2003 that coined the term “net neutrality”. Whereas the FCC sees broadband ISPs as enemies of consumers, Wu saw them as allies. His concern was not that ISPs would do evil things, but that they would do stupid things, such as favoring short-term interests over long-term innovation (such as having faster downloads than uploads).

The political depravity of the FCC’s order can be seen in this comment from one of the commissioners who voted for those rules:

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel wants to increase the minimum broadband standards far past the new 25Mbps download threshold, up to 100Mbps. “We invented the internet. We can do audacious things if we set big goals, and I think our new threshold, frankly, should be 100Mbps. I think anything short of that shortchanges our children, our future, and our new digital economy,” Commissioner Rosenworcel said.

This is indistinguishable from communist rhetoric that credits the Party for everything, as this booklet from North Korea will explain to you.

But what about monopolies? After all, while the free-market may work when there’s competition, it breaks down where there are fewer competitors, oligopolies, and monopolies.

There is some truth to this, in individual cities, there’s often only only a single credible high-speed broadband provider. But this isn’t the issue at stake here. The FCC isn’t proposing light-handed regulation to keep monopolies in check, but heavy-handed regulation that regulates every last decision.

Advocates of FCC regulation keep pointing how broadband monopolies can exploit their renting-seeking positions in order to screw the customer. They keep coming up with ever more bizarre and unlikely scenarios what monopoly power grants the ISPs.

But the never mention the most simplest: that broadband monopolies can just charge customers more money. They imagine instead that these companies will pursue a string of outrageous, evil, and less profitable behaviors to exploit their monopoly position.

The FCC’s reclassification of broadband under Title II gives it full power to regulate ISPs as utilities, including setting prices. The FCC has stepped back from this, promising it won’t go so far as to set prices, that it’s only regulating these evil conspiracy theories. This is kind of bizarre: either broadband ISPs are evilly exploiting their monopoly power or they aren’t. Why stop at regulating only half the evil?

The answer is that the claim “monopoly” power is a deception. It starts with overstating how many monopolies there are to begin with. When it issued its 2015 “Open Internet” order the FCC simultaneously redefined what they meant by “broadband”, upping the speed from 5-mbps to 25-mbps. That’s because while most consumers have multiple choices at 5-mbps, fewer consumers have multiple choices at 25-mbps. It’s a dirty political trick to convince you there is more of a problem than there is.

In any case, their rules still apply to the slower broadband providers, and equally apply to the mobile (cell phone) providers. The US has four mobile phone providers (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint) and plenty of competition between them. That it’s monopolistic power that the FCC cares about here is a lie. As their Open Internet order clearly shows, the fundamental principle that animates the document is that all corporations, monopolies or not, are treacherous and must be regulated.

“But corporations are indeed evil”, people argue, “see here’s a list of evil things they have done in the past!”

No, those things weren’t evil. They were done because they benefited the customers, not as some sort of secret rent seeking behavior.

For example, one of the more common “net neutrality abuses” that people mention is AT&T’s blocking of FaceTime. I’ve debunked this elsewhere on this blog, but the summary is this: there was no network blocking involved (not a “net neutrality” issue), and the FCC analyzed it and decided it was in the best interests of the consumer. It’s disingenuous to claim it’s an evil that justifies FCC actions when the FCC itself declared it not evil and took no action. It’s disingenuous to cite the “net neutrality” principle that all network traffic must be treated when, in fact, the network did treat all the traffic equally.

Another frequently cited abuse is Comcast’s throttling of BitTorrent.Comcast did this because Netflix users were complaining. Like all streaming video, Netflix backs off to slower speed (and poorer quality) when it experiences congestion. BitTorrent, uniquely among applications, never backs off. As most applications become slower and slower, BitTorrent just speeds up, consuming all available bandwidth. This is especially problematic when there’s limited upload bandwidth available. Thus, Comcast throttled BitTorrent during prime time TV viewing hours when the network was already overloaded by Netflix and other streams. BitTorrent users wouldn’t mind this throttling, because it often took days to download a big file anyway.

When the FCC took action, Comcast stopped the throttling and imposed bandwidth caps instead. This was a worse solution for everyone. It penalized heavy Netflix viewers, and prevented BitTorrent users from large downloads. Even though BitTorrent users were seen as the victims of this throttling, they’d vastly prefer the throttling over the bandwidth caps.

In both the FaceTime and BitTorrent cases, the issue was “network management”. AT&T had no competing video calling service, Comcast had no competing download service. They were only reacting to the fact their networks were overloaded, and did appropriate things to solve the problem.

Mobile carriers still struggle with the “network management” issue. While their networks are fast, they are still of low capacity, and quickly degrade under heavy use. They are looking for tricks in order to reduce usage while giving consumers maximum utility.

The biggest concern is video. It’s problematic because it’s designed to consume as much bandwidth as it can, throttling itself only when it experiences congestion. This is what you probably want when watching Netflix at the highest possible quality, but it’s bad when confronted with mobile bandwidth caps.

With small mobile devices, you don’t want as much quality anyway. You want the video degraded to lower quality, and lower bandwidth, all the time.

That’s the reasoning behind T-Mobile’s offerings. They offer an unlimited video plan in conjunction with the biggest video providers (Netflix, YouTube, etc.). The catch is that when congestion occurs, they’ll throttle it to lower quality. In other words, they give their bandwidth to all the other phones in your area first, then give you as much of the leftover bandwidth as you want for video.

While it sounds like T-Mobile is doing something evil, “zero-rating” certain video providers and degrading video quality, the FCC allows this, because they recognize it’s in the customer interest.

Mobile providers especially have great interest in more innovation in this area, in order to conserve precious bandwidth, but they are finding it costly. They can’t just innovate, but must ask the FCC permission first. And with the new heavy handed FCC rules, they’ve become hostile to this innovation. This attitude is highlighted by the statement from the “Open Internet” order:

And consumers must be protected, for example from mobile commercial practices masquerading as “reasonable network management.”

This is a clear declaration that free-market doesn’t work and won’t correct abuses, and that that mobile companies are treacherous and will do evil things without FCC oversight.

Conclusion

Ignoring the rhetoric for the moment, the debate comes down to simple left-wing authoritarianism and libertarian principles. The Obama administration created a regulatory regime under clear Democrat principles, and the Trump administration is rolling it back to more free-market principles. There is no principle at stake here, certainly nothing to do with a technical definition of “net neutrality”.

The 2015 “Open Internet” order is not about “treating network traffic neutrally”, because it doesn’t do that. Instead, it’s purely a left-wing document that claims corporations cannot be trusted, must be regulated, and that innovation and prosperity comes from the regulators and not the free market.

It’s not about monopolistic power. The primary targets of regulation are the mobile broadband providers, where there is plenty of competition, and who have the most “network management” issues. Even if it were just about wired broadband (like Comcast), it’s still ignoring the primary ways monopolies profit (raising prices) and instead focuses on bizarre and unlikely ways of rent seeking.

If you are a libertarian who nonetheless believes in this “net neutrality” slogan, you’ve got to do better than mindlessly repeating the arguments of the left-wing. The term itself, “net neutrality”, is just a slogan, varying from person to person, from moment to moment. You have to be more specific. If you truly believe in the “net neutrality” technical principle that all traffic should be treated equally, then you’ll want a rewrite of the “Open Internet” order.

In the end, while libertarians may still support some form of broadband regulation, it’s impossible to reconcile libertarianism with the 2015 “Open Internet”, or the vague things people mean by the slogan “net neutrality”.

Glenn Gore here, Chief Architect for AWS. I was in Las Vegas last week — with 43K others — for re:Invent 2017. I checked in to the Architecture blog here and here with my take on what was interesting about some of the bigger announcements from a cloud-architecture perspective.

In the excitement of so many new services being launched, we sometimes overlook feature updates that, while perhaps not as exciting as Amazon DeepLens, have significant impact on how you architect and develop solutions on AWS.

Amazon DynamoDB is used by more than 100,000 customers around the world, handling over a trillion requests every day. From the start, DynamoDB has offered high availability by natively spanning multiple Availability Zones within an AWS Region. As more customers started building and deploying truly-global applications, there was a need to replicate a DynamoDB table to multiple AWS Regions, allowing for read/write operations to occur in any region where the table was replicated. This update is important for providing a globally-consistent view of information — as users may transition from one region to another — or for providing additional levels of availability, allowing for failover between AWS Regions without loss of information.

There are some interesting concurrency-design aspects you need to be aware of and ensure you can handle correctly. For example, we support the “last writer wins” reconciliation where eventual consistency is being used and an application updates the same item in different AWS Regions at the same time. If you require strongly-consistent read/writes then you must perform all of your read/writes in the same AWS Region. The details behind this can be found in the DynamoDB documentation. Providing a globally-distributed, replicated DynamoDB table simplifies many different use cases and allows for the logic of replication, which may have been pushed up into the application layers to be simplified back down into the data layer.

The other big update for DynamoDB is that you can now back up your DynamoDB table on demand with no impact to performance. One of the features I really like is that when you trigger a backup, it is available instantly, regardless of the size of the table. Behind the scenes, we use snapshots and change logs to ensure a consistent backup. While backup is instant, restoring the table could take some time depending on its size and ranges — from minutes to hours for very large tables.

This feature is super important for those of you who work in regulated industries that often have strict requirements around data retention and backups of data, which sometimes limited the use of DynamoDB or required complex workarounds to implement some sort of backup feature in the past. This often incurred significant, additional costs due to increased read transactions on their DynamoDB tables.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) was our first-released AWS service over 11 years ago, and it proved the simplicity and scalability of true API-driven architectures in the cloud. Today, Amazon S3 stores trillions of objects, with transactional requests per second reaching into the millions! Dealing with data as objects opened up an incredibly diverse array of use cases ranging from libraries of static images, game binary downloads, and application log data, to massive data lakes used for big data analytics and business intelligence. With Amazon S3, when you accessed your data in an object, you effectively had to write/read the object as a whole or use the range feature to retrieve a part of the object — if possible — in your individual use case.

Now, with Amazon S3 Select, an SQL-like query language is used that can work with delimited text and JSON files, as well as work with GZIP compressed files. We don’t support encryption during the preview of Amazon S3 Select.

Amazon S3 Select provides two major benefits:

Faster access

Lower running costs

Serverless Lambda functions, where every millisecond matters when you are being charged, will benefit greatly from Amazon S3 Select as data retrieval and processing of your Lambda function will experience significant speedups and cost reductions. For example, we have seen 2x speed improvement and 80% cost reduction with the Serverless MapReduce code.

Other AWS services such as Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon EMR will support Amazon S3 Select as well as partner offerings including Cloudera and Hortonworks. If you are using Amazon Glacier for longer-term data archival, you will be able to use Amazon Glacier Select to retrieve a subset of your content from within Amazon Glacier.

As the volume of data that can be stored within Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier continues to scale on a daily basis, we will continue to innovate and develop improved and optimized services that will allow you to work with these magnificently-large data sets while reducing your costs (retrieval and processing). I believe this will also allow you to simplify the transformation and storage of incoming data into Amazon S3 in basic, semi-structured formats as a single copy vs. some of the duplication and reformatting of data sometimes required to do upfront optimizations for downstream processing. Amazon S3 Select largely removes the need for this upfront optimization and instead allows you to store data once and process it based on your individual Amazon S3 Select query per application or transaction need.

Today, we are launching the first Debian Stretch release of the Raspberry Pi Desktop for PCs and Macs, and we’re also releasing the latest version of Raspbian Stretch for your Pi.

For PCs and Macs

When we released our custom desktop environment on Debian for PCs and Macs last year, we were slightly taken aback by how popular it turned out to be. We really only created it as a result of one of those “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” conversations we sometimes have in the office, so we were delighted by the Pi community’s reaction.

Seeing how keen people were on the x86 version, we decided that we were going to try to keep releasing it alongside Raspbian, with the ultimate aim being to make simultaneous releases of both. This proved to be tricky, particularly with the move from the Jessie version of Debian to the Stretch version this year. However, we have now finished the job of porting all the custom code in Raspbian Stretch to Debian, and so the first Debian Stretch release of the Raspberry Pi Desktop for your PC or Mac is available from today.

The new Stretch releases

As with the Jessie release, you can either run this as a live image from a DVD, USB stick, or SD card or install it as the native operating system on the hard drive of an old laptop or desktop computer. Please note that installing this software will erase anything else on the hard drive — do not install this over a machine running Windows or macOS that you still need to use for its original purpose! It is, however, safe to boot a live image on such a machine, since your hard drive will not be touched by this.

We’re also pleased to announce that we are releasing the latest version of Raspbian Stretch for your Pi today. The Pi and PC versions are largely identical: as before, there are a few applications (such as Mathematica) which are exclusive to the Pi, but the user interface, desktop, and most applications will be exactly the same.

For Raspbian, this new release is mostly bug fixes and tweaks over the previous Stretch release, but there are one or two changes you might notice.

File manager

The file manager included as part of the LXDE desktop (on which our desktop is based) is a program called PCManFM, and it’s very feature-rich; there’s not much you can’t do in it. However, having used it for a few years, we felt that it was perhaps more complex than it needed to be — the sheer number of menu options and choices made some common operations more awkward than they needed to be. So to try to make file management easier, we have implemented a cut-down mode for the file manager.

Most of the changes are to do with the menus. We’ve removed a lot of options that most people are unlikely to change, and moved some other options into the Preferences screen rather than the menus. The two most common settings people tend to change — how icons are displayed and sorted — are now options on the toolbar and in a top-level menu rather than hidden away in submenus.

The sidebar now only shows a single hierarchical view of the file system, and we’ve tidied the toolbar and updated the icons to make them match our house style. We’ve removed the option for a tabbed interface, and we’ve stomped a few bugs as well.

One final change was to make it possible to rename a file just by clicking on its icon to highlight it, and then clicking on its name. This is the way renaming works on both Windows and macOS, and it’s always seemed slightly awkward that Unix desktop environments tend not to support it.

As with most of the other changes we’ve made to the desktop over the last few years, the intention is to make it simpler to use, and to ease the transition from non-Unix environments. But if you really don’t like what we’ve done and long for the old file manager, just untick the box for Display simplified user interface and menus in the Layout page of Preferences, and everything will be back the way it was!

Battery indicator for laptops

One important feature missing from the previous release was an indication of the amount of battery life. Eben runs our desktop on his Mac, and he was becoming slightly irritated by having to keep rebooting into macOS just to check whether his battery was about to die — so fixing this was a priority!

We’ve added a battery status icon to the taskbar; this shows current percentage charge, along with whether the battery is charging, discharging, or connected to the mains. When you hover over the icon with the mouse pointer, a tooltip with more details appears, including the time remaining if the battery can provide this information.

While this battery monitor is mainly intended for the PC version, it also supports the first-generation pi-top — to see it, you’ll only need to make sure that I2C is enabled in Configuration. A future release will support the new second-generation pi-top.

New PC applications

We have included a couple of new applications in the PC version. One is called PiServer — this allows you to set up an operating system, such as Raspbian, on the PC which can then be shared by a number of Pi clients networked to it. It is intended to make it easy for classrooms to have multiple Pis all running exactly the same software, and for the teacher to have control over how the software is installed and used. PiServer is quite a clever piece of software, and it’ll be covered in more detail in another blog post in December.

We’ve also added an application which allows you to easily use the GPIO pins of a Pi Zero connected via USB to a PC in applications using Scratch or Python. This makes it possible to run the same physical computing projects on the PC as you do on a Pi! Again, we’ll tell you more in a separate blog post this month.

Both of these applications are included as standard on the PC image, but not on the Raspbian image. You can run them on a Pi if you want — both can be installed from apt.

How to get the new versions

New images for both Raspbian and Debian versions are available from the Downloads page.

It is possible to update existing installations of both Raspbian and Debian versions. For Raspbian, this is easy: just open a terminal window and enter

How to update to the latest version of Raspbian on your Raspberry Pi. Download Raspbian here: More information on the latest version of Raspbian: Buy a Raspberry Pi:

It is slightly more complex for the PC version, as the previous release was based around Debian Jessie. You will need to edit the files /etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/raspi.list, using sudo to do so. In both files, change every occurrence of the word “jessie” to “stretch”. When that’s done, do the following:

At several points during the upgrade process, you will be asked if you want to keep the current version of a configuration file or to install the package maintainer’s version. In every case, keep the existing version, which is the default option. The update may take an hour or so, depending on your network connection.

As with all software updates, there is the possibility that something may go wrong during the process, which could lead to your operating system becoming corrupted. Therefore, we always recommend making a backup first.

Enjoy the new versions, and do let us know any feedback you have in the comments or on the forums!

There is little doubt that, in many countries, Netflix has become the standard for watching movies on the Internet.

Generally speaking, on-demand streaming services are convenient alternatives to piracy. However, millions of people stick to their old pirate habits, Netflix subscription or not.

Intrigued by this interplay of legal and unauthorized viewing, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Universidade Católica Portuguesa carried out an extensive study. They partnered with a major telco, which is not named, to analyze if BitTorrent downloading habits can be changed by offering legal alternatives.

The researchers used a piracy-tracking firm to get a sample of thousands of BitTorrent pirates at the associated ISP. Half of them were offered a free 45-day subscription to a premium TV and movies package, allowing them to watch popular content on demand.

To measure the effects of video-on-demand access on piracy, the researchers then monitored the legal viewing activity and BitTorrent transfers of the people who received the free offer, comparing it to a control group. The results show that piracy is harder to beat than some would expect.

Subscribers who received the free subscription watched more TV, but overall their torrenting habits didn’t change significantly.

“We find that, on average, households that received the gift increased overall TV consumption by 4.6% and reduced Internet downloads and uploads by 4.2% and 4.5%, respectively. However, and also on average, treated households did not change their likelihood of using BitTorrent during the experiment,” the researchers write.

One of the main problems was that these ‘pirates’ couldn’t get all their favorite shows and movies on the legal service, which is a common problem. For the small portion of subscribers who had access to their preferred content, the researchers did find an effect on torrent traffic.

“Households with preferences aligned with the gifted content reduced their probability of using BitTorrent during the experiment by 18% and decreased their amount of upload traffic by 45%,” the paper reads.

The video-on-demand service in the study had an average “fit” of just 12% with people’s viewing preferences, which means that they were missing a lot of content. But even Netflix, which has a library of thousands of titles, only has a fit of roughly 50%.

The researchers show that the lack of availability is partly caused by licensing windows, which makes it hard for legal video streaming services to compete with piracy.

“We show that licensing windows impose significant restrictions on the content that can be included in SVoD catalogs, which hampers the ability of content distributors to offer catalogs that cater to the preferences of pirates,” they write.

However, even if more content became available, piracy wouldn’t magically disappear. In the experiment, subscribers were offered free access to a video on demand service. In the real world, they would have to pay, which presents another barrier.

In this study, the pirate households were willing to pay at most $3.25 USD per month to access a service with a library as large as Netflix’s in the United States. That’s not enough.

This leads the researchers to the grim conclusion that video on demand services such as Netflix can’t significantly lower piracy rates. They could make a dent if they increase their content libraries while lowering the price at the same time, but that’s not going to happen.

“Together, our results show that, as a stand-alone strategy, using legal SVoD to curtail piracy will require, at the minimum, offering content much earlier and at much lower prices than those currently offered in the marketplace, changes that are likely to reduce industry revenue and that may damage overall incentives to produce new content while, at the same time, curbing only a small share of piracy,” the researchers conclude.

While Hollywood maintains that people can get pretty much anything they want legally, the current research shows that it’s not as simple as that. Most people are not going to pay for 22 separate subscriptions. Instead of more streaming services, it would be better to make more content available at the ones that are already out there.

The research was partially funded by the Carnegie Mellon University’s IDEA, which receives an unrestricted gift from the MPAA, so Hollywood will likely be clued in on the results.

Late October 2016, we reported on an alarming situation in Poland, where police had visited hundreds of homes across the country, seizing computers alleged to have been involved in the sharing of a comedy movie titled “Screwed“.

In some cases, police reportedly advised suspects to settle with copyright holders rather than face legal action, something critics felt was particularly inappropriate in an unproven copyright case. Now it appears that history is repeating itself in the region, with people being targeted over downloads of a local thriller titled “Drogówka”.

While this is of concern in itself, the alleged offenses took place via BitTorrent way back in 2013, four whole years ago. Local journalist Marcin Maj at Bezprawnik, who’s also an IT security instructor at Niebezpiecznik, has been documenting the activities of copyright trolls in Poland for some time. He picked up the story this week after he learned that police had seized an alleged file-sharer’s computer.

After speaking with local police, he subsequently discovered that 200 to 300 other people had been given the same treatment.

Maj says that after presenting a long list of questions to authorities, he learned that these seizures have been going on continuously for about a year, following a criminal complaint filed by a law firm. It’s that this point that the uncomfortable nature of this whole operation becomes apparent.

“It’s important to understand that in the Polish legal system, it’s impossible to sue someone who is unknown to a plaintiff [John Doe]. But you can always start a criminal proceeding.”

Such a criminal proceeding was filed in 2014 but it appears that Glass-Brudziński used the process to gain a secondary advantage.

“As a barrister of the [copyright holder], Artur Glass-Brudziński had access to the prosecutor’s documentation. So he used this to obtain identified names and addresses, without waiting for the end of the criminal proceeding. Those people were just witnesses, but Glass-Brudziński sent thousands of letters to them, suggesting they are suspects, which was not true,” Maj says.

So, in effect, a criminal action was used to gain access to personal details that were subsequently used in civil actions. That’s completely legal and quite common in Poland but many view the process as problematic.

“Polish lawyers see this as something not quite ethical,” Maj reports. “Now Glass-Brudziński faces a disciplinary court because his letters were quite misleading. Regardless of that, however, criminal proceedings are still underway.”

A hearing took place before the Disciplinary Court November 13 but a resolution will take some time to reach since there around 80 people involved in the case. In the meantime the current criminal case continues, with several problems.

For example, it’s quite likely that many people will have changed their computers since 2013, but the police are required to seize the ones people currently have. Also, Maj reports that after speaking to people who received demands for cash payment, many report having had nothing to do with the alleged offenses. But there is a broader problem around such cases in general.

As we reported last year, prosecutors admit that they do not verify the technical processes that the copyright holders use to identify the alleged infringers, meaning that hundreds of members of the public are subjected to property seizures based on untested evidence.

“Polish prosecutors often decide to seize computers just because they got an IP address list from a lawyer. Sometimes even prosecutors don’t want to do that, but copyright owners complain to the courts, and the courts issue an order to seize machines. That’s deeply absurd,” Maj says.

“Many times I have asked prosecutors if they check the method used to track pirates. Many times I have asked prosecutors if they have found evidence on every seized computer. The answers? No. They don’t check the method of tracking pirates, and evidence is found only ‘sometimes’.”

There are clearly mounting problems in Poland with both evidence and discovery-based loopholes providing copyright holders with a significant advantage. While questionable, it’s currently all legal, so it seems likely that as long as ‘victims’ can gain access to private information via criminal cases, the cash threats will continue. It’s a topic covered in a report compiled by Maj and the Modern Poland Foundation (Polish, pdf)

“Computer seizures and our report were discussed in the lower house of the Polish parliament in 2016, at the meeting of the Commision of Digitalization, Innovation and New Technologies. Many politicians are aware of the problem and they declare we should do something to stop bullying and seizures. Unfortunately, it all ended with was declarations,” Maj concludes.

This is a guest blog post by Wes Couch and Kurt Waechter from the Blackboard Internal Product Development team about their experience using AWS Lambda.

One year ago, one of our UI test suites took hours to run. Last month, it took 16 minutes. Today, it takes 39 seconds. Here’s how we did it.

The backstory:

Blackboard is a global leader in delivering robust and innovative education software and services to clients in higher education, government, K12, and corporate training. We have a large product development team working across the globe in at least 10 different time zones, with an internal tools team providing support for quality and workflows. We have been using Selenium Webdriver to perform automated cross-browser UI testing since 2007. Because we are now practicing continuous delivery, the automated UI testing challenge has grown due to the faster release schedule. On top of that, every commit made to each branch triggers an execution of our automated UI test suite. If you have ever implemented an automated UI testing infrastructure, you know that it can be very challenging to scale and maintain. Although there are services that are useful for testing different browser/OS combinations, they don’t meet our scale needs.

It used to take three hours to synchronously run our functional UI suite, which revealed the obvious need for parallel execution. Previously, we used Mesos to orchestrate a Selenium Grid Docker container for each test run. This way, we were able to run eight concurrent threads for test execution, which took an average of 16 minutes. Although this setup is fine for a single workflow, the cracks started to show when we reached the scale required for Blackboard’s mature product lines. Going beyond eight concurrent sessions on a single container introduced performance problems that impact the reliability of tests (for example, issues in Webdriver or the browser popping up frequently). We tried Mesos and considered Kubernetes for Selenium Grid orchestration, but the answer to scaling a Selenium Grid was to think smaller, not larger. This led to our breakthrough with AWS Lambda.

The solution:

We started using AWS Lambda for UI testing because it doesn’t require costly infrastructure or countless man hours to maintain. The steps we outline in this blog post took one work day, from inception to implementation. By simply packaging the UI test suite into a Lambda function, we can execute these tests in parallel on a massive scale. We use a custom JUnit test runner that invokes the Lambda function with a request to run each test from the suite. The runner then aggregates the results returned from each Lambda test execution.

Selenium is the industry standard for testing UI at scale. Although there are other options to achieve the same thing in Lambda, we chose this mature suite of tools. Selenium is backed by Google, Firefox, and others to help the industry drive their browsers with code. This makes Lambda and Selenium a compelling stack for achieving UI testing at scale.

Making Chrome Run in Lambda

Currently, Chrome for Linux will not run in Lambda due to an absent mount point. By rebuilding Chrome with a slight modification, as Marco Lüthy originally demonstrated, you can run it inside Lambda anyway! It took about two hours to build the current master branch of Chromium to build on a c4.4xlarge. Unfortunately, the current version of ChromeDriver, 2.33, does not support any version of Chrome above 62, so we’ll be using Marco’s modified version of version 60 for the near future.

Required System Libraries

The Lambda runtime environment comes with a subset of common shared libraries. This means we need to include some extra libraries to get Chrome and ChromeDriver to work. Anything that exists in the java resources folder during compile time is included in the base directory of the compiled jar file. When this jar file is deployed to Lambda, it is placed in the /var/task/ directory. This allows us to simply place the libraries in the java resources folder under a folder named lib/ so they are right where they need to be when the Lambda function is invoked.

To get these libraries, create an EC2 instance and choose the Amazon Linux AMI.

Next, use ssh to connect to the server. After you connect to the new instance, search for the libraries to find their locations.

sudo find / -name libgconf-2.so.4
sudo find / -name libORBit-2.so.0

Now that you have the locations of the libraries, copy these files from the EC2 instance and place them in the java resources folder under lib/.

Packaging the Tests

To deploy the test suite to Lambda, we used a simple Gradle tool called ShadowJar, which is similar to the Maven Shade Plugin. It packages the libraries and dependencies inside the jar that is built. Usually test dependencies and sources aren’t included in a jar, but for this instance we want to include them. To include the test dependencies, add this section to the build.gradle file.

Deploying the Test Suite

Now that our tests are packaged with the dependencies in a jar, we need to get them into a running Lambda function. We use simple SAM templates to upload the packaged jar into S3, and then deploy it to Lambda with our settings.

We use the maximum timeout available to ensure our tests have plenty of time to run. We also use the maximum memory size because this ensures our Lambda function can support Chrome and other resources required to run a UI test.

Specifying the handler is important because this class executes the desired test. The test handler should be able to receive a test class and method. With this information it will then execute the test and respond with the results.

Creating a Lambda-Compatible ChromeDriver

We provide developers with an easily accessible ChromeDriver for local test writing and debugging. When we are running tests on AWS, we have configured ChromeDriver to run them in Lambda.

To configure ChromeDriver, we first need to tell ChromeDriver where to find the Chrome binary. Because we know that ChromeDriver is going to be unzipped into the root task directory, we should point the ChromeDriver configuration at that location.

The settings for getting ChromeDriver running are mostly related to Chrome, which must have its working directories pointed at the tmp/ folder.

Start with the default DesiredCapabilities for ChromeDriver, and then add the following settings to enable your ChromeDriver to start in Lambda.

Executing Tests in Parallel

You can approach parallel test execution in Lambda in many different ways. Your approach depends on the structure and design of your test suite. For our solution, we implemented a custom test runner that uses reflection and JUnit libraries to create a list of test cases we want run. When we have the list, we create a TestRequest object to pass into the Lambda function that we have deployed. In this TestRequest, we place the class name, test method, and the test run identifier. When the Lambda function receives this TestRequest, our LambdaTestHandler generates and runs the JUnit test. After the test is complete, the test result is sent to the test runner. The test runner compiles a result after all of the tests are complete. By executing the same Lambda function multiple times with different test requests, we can effectively run the entire test suite in parallel.

To get screenshots and other test data, we pipe those files during test execution to an S3 bucket under the test run identifier prefix. When the tests are complete, we link the files to each test execution in the report generated from the test run. This lets us easily investigate test executions.

Pro Tip: Dynamically Loading Binaries

AWS Lambda has a limit of 250 MB of uncompressed space for packaged Lambda functions. Because we have libraries and other dependencies to our test suite, we hit this limit when we tried to upload a function that contained Chrome and ChromeDriver (~140 MB). This test suite was not originally intended to be used with Lambda. Otherwise, we would have scrutinized some of the included libraries. To get around this limit, we used the Lambda functions temporary directory, which allows up to 500 MB of space at runtime. Downloading these binaries at runtime moves some of that space requirement into the temporary directory. This allows more room for libraries and dependencies. You can do this by grabbing Chrome and ChromeDriver from an S3 bucket and marking them as executable using built-in Java libraries. If you take this route, be sure to point to the new location for these executables in order to create a ChromeDriver.

Lambda-Selenium Project Source

Conclusion

One year ago, one of our UI test suites took hours to run. Last month, it took 16 minutes. Today, it takes 39 seconds. Thanks to AWS Lambda, we can reduce our build times and perform automated UI testing at scale!

While Switzerland sits geographically in the heart of Europe, the country is not part of the European Union, meaning that its copyright laws are often out of touch with those of the countries encircling it.

For years this has meant heavy criticism from the United States, whose trade representative has put Switzerland on the Watch List, citing weaknesses in the country’s ability to curb online copyright infringement.

“The decision to place Switzerland on the Watch List this year is premised on U.S. concerns regarding specific difficulties in Switzerland’s system of online copyright protection and enforcement,” the USTR wrote in 2016.

Things didn’t improve in 2017. Referencing the so-called Logistep Decision, which found that collecting infringers’ IP addresses is unlawful, the USTR said that Switzerland had effectively deprived copyright holders of the means to enforce their rights online.

All of this criticism hasn’t fallen on deaf ears. For the past several years, Switzerland has been deeply involved in consultations that aim to shape future copyright law. Negotiations have been prolonged, however, with the Federal Council aiming to improve the situation for creators without impairing the position of consumers.

A new draft compromise tabled Wednesday is somewhat of a mixed bag, one that is unlikely to please the United States overall but could prove reasonably acceptable to the public.

First of all, people will still be able to ‘pirate’ as much copyrighted material as they like, as long as that content is consumed privately and does not include videogames or software, which are excluded. Any supposed losses accrued by the entertainment industries will be compensated via a compulsory tax of 13 Swiss francs ($13), levied on media playback devices including phones and tablets.

This freedom only applies to downloading and streaming, meaning that any uploading (distribution) is explicitly ruled out. So, while grabbing some streaming content via a ‘pirate’ Kodi addon is just fine, using BitTorrent to achieve the same is ruled out.

Indeed, rightsholders will be able to capture IP addresses of suspected infringers in order to file a criminal complaint with authorities. That being said, there will no system of warning notices targeting file-sharers.

But while the authorization of unlicensed downloads will only frustrate an already irritated United States, the other half of the deal is likely to be welcomed.

Under the recommendations, Internet services will not only be required to remove infringing content from their platforms, they’ll also be compelled to prevent that same content from reappearing. Failure to comply will result in prosecution. It’s a standard that copyright holders everywhere are keen for governments to adopt.

Additionally, the spotlight will fall on datacenters and webhosts that have a reputation for being popular with pirate sites. It’s envisioned that such providers will be prevented from offering services to known pirate sites, with the government clearly stating that services with piracy at the heart of their business models will be ripe for action.

But where there’s a plus for copyright holders, the Swiss have another minus. Previously it was proposed that in serious cases authorities should be able to order the ISP blocking of “obviously illegal content or sources.” That proposal has now been dropped, meaning no site-blocking will be allowed.

Other changes in the draft envision an extension of the copyright term from 50 to 70 years and improved protection for photographic works. The proposals also feature increased freedoms for researchers and libraries, who will be able to use copyrighted works without obtaining permission from rightsholders.

Overall the proposals are a pretty mixed bag but as Minister of Justice Simonetta Sommaruga said Wednesday, if no one is prepared to compromise, no one will get anything.

Financed by Russian Facebook (vKontakte) founder Pavel Durov, Telegram is a multi-platform messaging system that has grown from 100,000 daily users in 2013 to an impressive 100 million users in February 2016.

“Telegram is a messaging app with a focus on speed and security, it’s super-fast, simple and free. You can use Telegram on all your devices at the same time — your messages sync seamlessly across any number of your phones, tablets or computers,” the company’s marketing reads.

One of the attractive things about Telegram is that it allows users to communicate with each other using end-to-end encryption. In some cases, these systems are used for content piracy, of music and other smaller files in particular. This is compounded by the presence of user-programmed bots, which are able to search the web for illegal content and present it in a Telegram channel to which other users can subscribe.

While much of this sharing files under the radar when conducted privately, it periodically attracts attention from copyright holders when it takes place in public channels. That appears to have happened recently when popular channel “Any Suitable Pop” was completely disabled by Telegram, an apparent first following a copyright complaint.

According to channel creator Anton Vagin, the action by Telegram was probably due to the unauthorized recent sharing of the Taylor Swift album ‘Reputation’. However, it was the route of complaint that proves of most interest.

Rather than receiving a takedown notice directly from Big Machine Records, the label behind Swift’s releases, Telegram was forced into action after receiving threats from Apple and Google, the companies that distribute the Telegram app for iOS and Android respectively.

According to a message Vagin received from Telegram support, Apple and Google had received complaints about Swift’s album from Universal Music, the distributor of Big Machine Records. The suggestion was that if Telegram didn’t delete the infringing channel, distribution of the Telegram app via iTunes and Google Play would be at risk. Vagin received no warning notices from any of the companies involved.

Message from Telegram support

According to Russian news outlet VC.ru, which first reported the news, the channel was blocked in Telegram’s desktop applications, as well as in versions for Android, macOS and iOS. However, the channel still existed on the web and via Windows phone applications but all messages within had been deleted.

The fact that Google played a major role in the disappearing of the channel was subsequently confirmed by Telegram founder Pavel Durov, who commented that it was Google who “ultimately demanded the blocking of this channel.”

That Telegram finally caved into the demands of Google and/or Apple doesn’t really come as a surprise. In Telegram’s frequently asked questions section, the company specifically mentions the need to comply with copyright takedown demands in order to maintain distribution via the companies’ app marketplaces.

“Our mission is to provide a secure means of communication that works everywhere on the planet. To do this in the places where it is most needed (and to continue distributing Telegram through the App Store and Google Play), we have to process legitimate requests to take down illegal public content (sticker sets, bots, and channels) within the app,” the company notes.

Putting pressure on Telegram via Google and Apple over piracy isn’t a new development. In the past, representatives of the music industry threatened to complain to the companies over a channel operated by torrent site RuTracker, which was set up to share magnet links.

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